Nozawa Onsen Customer Reviews

Good choice of restaurants, very friendly and welcoming people with a relaxed atmosphere. Good varied ski runs, wide open pistes and picturesque. If you want Japanese experience this it it.

Such a pretty ski area. Lots of big open runs, and narrow access runs. Beautiful tree lined pistes. easy to navigate around. Competent snowboarders and skiers will cover most the resort in 3 days. Recommend making the most of the mornings, it's so quiet up until lunchtime. Perfectly pisted runs all to yourself - you'd never experience that in Europe! Decent chairlifts and hardly any queues. Get your lift pass in town - some hotels offer flexible non-consecutive 3 day passes. Great food available too - on the piste and in town. The town is lovely too - best way to unwind after a day on the hill? The onsens!

It is still a very traditional Japanese resort and is as yet unspoilt by western influences. It had everything we needed in terms of places to eat and drink. At weekends it can be difficult to get a table to eat as the resort becomes busy with Japanese visitors but we found it is good to have to look around town as you find places you hadn't spotted before. We hired our gear from Shirakuba who, as always, were very good. The slopes are well looked after and the snow was good (until the day we left, thankfully). The people at the ski school are very friendly and helpful and all of local Japanese people are friendly and would do anything to help. We tried Sparena this time to soak our aching muscles; it was great to sit in a hot tub while the wind and snow blew in to stop us getting too hot. What a lovely place!

Stayed in a traditional Japanese Accomodation which added to the experience. Japanese style breakfast was amazing and the onsite Onsen was lovely. Male, female and private onsen’s available. Full of character in the town with lots of great and cheap food options. Ski area was easily covered in a day but offered variety with off piste, on piste and tree skiing. Great place to mix skiing with Japanese culture.

Nozawa Onsen was a fabulous little place, and although we didn’t really have any fresh snow or powder days there, the weather was perfect and frankly after Hokkaido we were happy enough pottering around the pistes! On the final day there the weather wasn’t so great, so we took a little bus trip to see the snow monkeys which were very cute. The Tokiwaya ryokan was just lovely, and again the staff there were absolutely perfect.

Nozawa Onsen village has great charm and is quite pleasing. Definitely worth a visit. We had 2 days skiing there, which was enough, with fresh snow on both days. With in-bound skiing only possible in the limited area at the top of the mountain, fresh tracks can only be had for less than 2 hours. Queues here were the longest that we experienced in Japan, but still fairly short (and orderly and well behaved) unlike Europe!